IS THIS TITLE TRUE OR MERELY CLEVER?

I lost the reference for the following paragraph by it was from a magazine called, “The Sun” from an edition from this past year.  The author is going to make a statement.  After you read it, stop and think about it.  Do you agree with it or not and most importantly WHY? 

 

“The self is always moving.  It isn’t going to continue existing after you die.  The minute you buy into the idea that some part of you will hang around, you’ve removed yourself from this world of trees and clouds and birds.  And if you’re not in this flowing world of change, then you’re nowhere.”

 

Now stop, pray, and think.  Is this true?  If it is true or not true, why? 

 

Now that you have done that, here is one possible response:

 

The man who made this statement is a man of deep faith.  He bases his theory upon ideas that are no more “provable” than that of the Christian – I would argue even less so.  That nothing of us lives on is an assumed principle upon which the rest of his theory rests.  But even if we grant him this, does the rest of his hypothesis hold true?

 

If that to which he is referring is the Christian theology that is held by much of the Protestant world and that of some other religions that creation is bad and spirit is good, then he may have something.  Those who call the body evil (or at least opposed to that which is good) have to deny the body and focus on the spirit exclusively.  Mud is bad, angels are good.  Therefor the world is something to be used and discarded.  Its sole purpose is to steer us toward the spiritual.  Then it is true that we not ever really here and a part of creation.

 

But is the opposite true?  If nothing of us lives on does that ipso facto make us more here among the birds and the clouds?  If this is the case then there are no consequences for how we treat the nature other what than might recoil back on ourselves as the line goes, “Don’t pee in your own well.”  But when I die, I cease to exist.  Eventually there will be no one to remember me.  The Earth is a fluke that will one day also simply cease to be.  Humans will not even be a memory.  You might want to keep things nice “for the next guy” but in the end that would just because you want to not because there is any truth to the idea of “the good.”  Preservation is just as much a selfish act as abuse.  So why not suck as much life out of this earth as possible?  Throw another log on the fire, drink out of Styrofoam cup, and rev up the gas generator so that you can listen to some tunes on your radio.  If you are abusing anything, you are not really present to it either.

 

But what if, as in Catholic theology, everything that is is good.  God created all from nothing and he holds it in being.  Then everything to some extent participates in God.  The computer screen on which you are reading this is good.  The paper, ink, persons depicted, and form of a porn magazine are good.  What man did with those things is bad.  (Hence the true perversion of sin!)  If the world is good, if there will be an accounting of how we handled the world (as there was with Adam and the garden,) then won’t we appreciate more, be better to, be more aware of, and be more present to the trees, the clouds, and the birds?

 

I had a skateboard once that I used on the parking lot across the street from my house.  I would skate down the hill and then kick the board back up.  My Mom stopped me one day to explain how expensive that toy was and how I was expected to take better care of it.  Knowing that my actions would be seen, and being taught about the value of my board, I was much more present to it.

ABSURDITY IS IN THE EYES OF THE BEHOLDER

Here is part two of “Atlas Said,” a commentary on common objections to the faith:

ATLAS SAID:

“Secondly, It matters not if I'm wrong, 'cause the "All-Loving" God will toss me to eternal wrath pain and suffering (which to me is a bit excessive, but hey, u gotta kill non-believers somehow I guess). The thing is what if YOU'RE wrong and you devoted your life to faith in that which is not their. I don't mean to be a (censored), but I mean, WHY do u irrationally believe their is a God and WHY do people not see that Evolution is a Fact?”

It is often the case that a person has some erroneous idea that if God is all loving then there will be absolutely no consequences for one’s actions. “God’s wrath and God’s mercy are two sides of the same coin,” one spiritual guide once said. At heart here are two questions: What is love and what does God want from us.

There are many definitions of love but in this case only one that matters and that is how God defines love. We have many commandments to love: Love the Lord your God, Love you neighbor, love your enemies. I do not have warm and fuzzy feeling about my enemies. But is that what God is calling us to? “I demand that you have warm fuzzy feelings about everybody!” If this is the case, then we have a mighty cruel God Who demands that we have feelings since we cannot summon them up at will. So God must be talking about something else.

While not denying that emotions play a role in our love life at its core God is talking about decisions; primarily the decision for the betterment of the other person – and that is first and foremost their salvation. That means if my enemy is standing in the middle of the road and a bus is bearing down on them and I grab them and pull them out of the street I have acted in love toward them. If my best friend is doing something that places his salvation in danger it might mean I must risk losing our friendship to help him or even allowing him to deal with the consequences of his behavior in order for him to find truth.

So why is not everything perfect on earth? Why does God allow us to suffer war and hunger and anger? Does He cause it? No. We do. We could end war and starvation easily enough. But we choose not to. And He allows us to live with consequences (or we would never do anything that does not suit us directly would we?) Hell is much the same thing. Hell is our doing, not God’s. And on His part it is actually an act of mercy. “Nothing unclean shall enter before God” Scripture tells us. God condemns nobody to Hell. By our lives we tell God where we want to be. Could you imagine choosing “not God” with your life and then be forced to sit before His thrown for all of eternity? Rather in His mercy He allows souls their own limited realm so that they can have that which they have chosen. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in heaven,” says the devil. Indeed. And so God allows it.

The next part is an interesting (and in my estimation more dangerous) twist on Paschal’s wager which offers the proposition that if one chooses to believe in God and there is a God one in a sense “wins.” If one chooses to believe in God and there is no God, one would never know – but they would have had a life full of hope and purpose. Atlas, I think, is worried about being duped. What if we are wrong? Paschal answered that for us. But what if one chooses not to believe and they are wrong? There is a place for that.

If He does exists (and I believe wholeheartedly that He does) what does God ultimately want from us? There is a reason He is named Father. He is looking for a relationship. That is why God’s connection to His Church in Scripture is most often referred to as a marriage. This marriage is calling all in the Church toward community and unity – toward charity – toward peace. This is completely irrational! Yes it is! It makes much more sense to go after pleasure when and where I want it – to look after me and mine! It is irrational but it is what we choose as given to us by our Creator.

Now I am going to say something that will disturb some people out there. Darwinism is not fact. Not even science says so. It is a theory and, unfortunately one that is suffering at the moment – at least the way Darwin put it forth – no matter what your eighth grade science book says. This is not my or the Church’s view – this is modern science’s view. So they are on the search for another way to explain life.

In his book, “The Case for a Creator” by Lee Strobel which I recommend just because it is interesting (it will give you a different perspective even if you do not completely buy it) it makes the following point: “If Darwinism is true,” he reports the prominent evolutionary biologist and historian William Provine of Cornell University as saying, “there are five inescapable conclusions:
1 there’s no evidence for God.
2 there’s no life after death.
3 there’s no absolute foundation for right and wrong.
4 there’s no ultimate meaning of life.
5 people don’t really have free will.

Given the choice then of being wrong about a having a Creator or not – I err on the side of having one for life is just too bleak and senseless without him.

Lastly, for Darwinism to be true, he further reports, we must also believe the following:

1 Nothing produces everything.
2 Non-life produces life.
3 Randomness produces fine tuning.
4 Chaos produces organized information.
5 Unconsciousness produces consciousness.
6 Non-reason produces reason.

In the end then I guess I believe because as irrational as faith is, I find accepting this as far more irrational.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE - DOES IT MATTER?

THE FOLLOWING IS A STUDY OF WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE TELEVISION IS NOT WORKING. BE WARNED. THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU.

(Written before election results know.)

There is a theory out there that says if you have a million monkeys typing randomly on a million typewriters they will eventually produce the entire works of William Shakespeare in Church Latin with footnotes. I suppose it is possible that this is true but probably impossible to prove because of the difficulties in finding a million typewriters these days and no computer’s shelf life lasting long enough to put this theory to the test.

This is the same theory that is used to say that human life came about. Without any Divine plan (some would say) and through absolutely random occurrences life began and developed into what has become millions upon millions of people typing on millions of computers randomly hoping to reproduce something as spectacular as William Shakespeare’s writings. Good luck.

This blows our minds – the Shakespeare part - that such incredible order would be wrought out of such randomness. But of course it is not randomness. Not entirely. There is already the substructure of letters and a limited number of ways which they can be put together because of the mechanics of the typewriter. For this theory to really take off, we would have to say (and in essence we do) that left to itself, primordial ooze will eventually reproduce the Bard’s complete opus.

You know, I could almost buy this theory for the creation of humans if we only had the power to see, or if we only had the power to hear. But we have the power to see, to hear, to smell, to feel, and to taste. But that is not all. These also work in concert and we have cognitive abilities to put them together and come to conclusions based on the information. “I see a threatening sky, I hear thunder, I feel rain, I better seek shelter.” Have you ever thought about this? How absurdly incredible this is? I can’t even get my computer to talk to my printer. The sheer magnitude of the genius of the human person astounds me. The mathematical probabilities verge on the unimaginable that it is all a random fluke. (Although I am assured that we are dealing with almost infinite time and infinite situations which makes it possible for primordial ooze to create Elizabethan literature. At this point an infinite God seems a more sane possibility.)

But if a fluke, it is also sad. Existence is a fluke. What greater good is there to appreciate it? Why recycle that water bottle? To save life for the next generation? Why? It really would not matter if the next generation existed or not. Who cares? They can't. As soon as my body temperature drops a few degrees and there is six feet of organic matter piled on top of a box holding a once fluke of life, I will not rest assured that I did good for future generations. I won’t care. As a matter of fact, I won’t be able even to not care. And there will be no cognitive force to think, “Gee, isn’t that too bad?” It is not good to exist and evil not to. There just is existing and not existing. But statistically, with enough time, primordial ooze will congeal back and “I” will exist again given enough sub atomic particles are given enough typewriters.

Extreme rationalism can explain this whole un-mess including our desire for our God. “We invented God in order to be able to handle life.” Actually any explanation for our desire for God is permissible except for the easiest: That there is God – and if nothing else, He guided the million atoms on their typewriters.

In the end I accept the wager that there is God that gives meaning, direction, hope, and joy to us in this life, especially this month in which we remember the Poor Souls. Beauty must have meaning outside of me or it isn’t beauty. It is a card shark’s game in which we will all lose and it won’t matter.

FIT FOR A KING

A priest friend of mine was always fond of talking about our bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit but he smoked like a chimney. I once asked about that incongruity. After all, if the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, should we not take better care of it than that? To which he replied, “I’m just incensing the temple.”

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, “You must know that you body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is within – the Spirit you have received from God. You are not your own. You have been purchased, and at a price. So glorify God in your body.”

Of course the greatest way to glorify God in your body is to strive to be holy. “Rend you hearts, not your garments.” (Joel 2:13) And indeed many saints focused their sanctity there, as well we all should. They did not all necessarily sanctify their bodies in the physical sense I suppose. They didn’t all have the nice slender, healthy, well built bodies sculptures and painters would like us to believe they had. In fact, St. Thomas Aquinas is said to be have been large enough that a circle had to be cut into the table in order for him to pull himself up to it.

But there is merit in glorifying God by treating your body well. Your creation after all is good. You were made good and intended to be good. The Holy Spirit abides in you and at mass you become a tabernacle of the Lord when you receive Holy Communion. So what we do with this gift of our bodies is significant.

It is not a neutral but a morally good thing to treat the body well (and to assist others to do the same.) This includes eating well (and sometimes fasting), exercising and trying to get enough rest. It also means adorning it with modesty, remaining chaste, and using our gifts of the senses to take in what is good and shunning that which is base as we develop our minds. It is also a call to develop our abilities for the glory of God and the building up of our brothers and sisters.

Your body is a gem of creation making you capable of bringing incredible good into the world, of being an image of Christ for others. Treat you body with the respect, dignity, care, and modesty such a gift deserves.